Have to Write a Baseball Story Sometime: Hemingway, the Busher, and The Old Man and the Sea

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Have to Write a Baseball Story SometimeHemingway, the Busher, and The Old Man and the Sea Scott D. Peterson (bio) Don't you know there aren't any fathers on a ball field? —Gregory "Gigi" Hemingway to his father, Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner, 36 This resonating, Busher-like retort comes from one of Hemingway's letters to his friend A. E. Hotchner in 1949 during a prolonged exchange in which baseball was discussed in each letter between them. Hemingway lauds Gigi's control to the point of comparing him to Grover Cleveland Alexander (whom Hemingway met as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1918), and he seems to be proud that his youngest boy is tough enough to "try and knock everybody's cap off on the first pitch."1 Gigi's retort comes after he dusts his Papa, prompting Hemingway to ask, "Don't you know any better than to throw at your own father?"2 The irony here is that Hemingway threw at his own literary "fathers," starting with Sherwood Anderson, the target of The Torrents of Spring's satire. Another mentor, Ring Lardner, comes under fire in The Old Man and the Sea, when the protagonist, Santiago, leaves his fishing village and undertakes a Busher's journey to fulfill Hemingway's promise to "write a baseball story sometime."3 The latter brushback is especially fitting when we factor in the possibility that Santiago's overblown reverence for the "Gran Ligas" and the "great DiMaggio" are being played for laughs at a besotted Busher in the same vein as Lardner's narratives.4 Hemingway thus extended Lardner's vernacular modernist experiment to the middle of the twentieth century through his letters, short fiction, and The Old Man and the Sea as his use of the Busher figure transitioned from the objectification of a cultural other to identification with someone we can root for as "one of us."5 Vernacular modernism has been used as a critical approach in architectural [End Page 89] and film studies, but the theory is just beginning to be used by literary critics, according to Brooks E. Hefner, who uses the concept as a "model for rethinking modernist boundaries … by fully considering the modernist project of experimentation with language across race, class, and ethnicity in American popular writing of the 1910s and 1920s."6 As Hefner notes, Ring Lardner fits the definition as an early twentieth century writer without strong transnational ties and who used American vernacular to write for working class and middlebrow audiences.7 Although Ernest Hemingway has been linked with high American modernists for some time, his letters, short fiction, and novels also serve as examples of Hefner's vernacular modernism, beginning with Hemingway's apprenticeship in the 1910s and extending to the publication of The Old Man and the Sea at midcentury.8 Further, as journalists turned fiction writers, Hemingway and Lardner encouraged identification between their characters and their readers through the use of actual details, humanizing elements, and vernacular dialect.9 Vernacular dialect as employed by Lardner and Hemingway can be characterized by Michael Denning's concepts of ventriloquism—"throwing one's voice into the form of another" with Horatio Alger being a prime example—and impersonation, which involves the writer "assuming the voice of another in one's own form" to "represent, speak for, their audiences."10 Like his mentor Lardner, Hemingway laughed at the Busher through humorous use of ventriloquism while also encouraging identification with the figure by employing impersonation to speak in meaningful ways for the recurring character in baseball fiction of a brash, over-confident young player who leaves his rural background to "make good" in the major leagues. The long journey to The Old Man and the Sea started with Hemingway's apprenticeship steeped in elements of baseball and vernacular modernism through ventriloquism as he threw his voice into Ring Lardner's Busher figure.11 Hemingway's experience with Bushers began early: out of the ten baseball players named in requests for "action pictures" from the Sporting News and "art photos" from Baseball Magazine at ages twelve and sixteen, six of...